The rise of technology has created new ways of marketing products, innovative ways to reach consumers and brand new platforms to do it all on.

You don’t need to know much about marketing to know that the likes of social media, blogs and websites, apps, text messages and so on have enabled fast and direct communication between the brand and the customer.

What has been important for an effective campaign in 2015 will remain important as we head into 2016, such as using all the platforms available, because each brings something new and unique to the campaign. To ignore any one could mean missing out on a huge amount of potential customers and potentially losing the loyalty of your current customers.

But, as well as using them all, it is important to ensure they are supporting each other. For example, a TV advert could ask the customer to tweet using a certain hashtag to become part of a conversation.

However, simply using these platforms is not enough. You also need to get feedback – which can be done instantly through the platforms, to discover how successful your campaign is. This will enable you to find out what is and isn’t liked and what you need to change. This could be something small that can be done quickly and easily, but will make a big difference to your company.

If you don’t ask, you won’t know – so use mobile surveys or Twitter polls to ask your customers questions and find out their thoughts. GlobalMessaging, for example, allows two ways for mobile surveys to be conducted; either by using a web based mobile survey tool or a simple 2-way transcript survey.

But you don’t just want to keep up-to-date with marketing platforms and the competition, you want to get ahead. So, how do you create a diverse but effective campaign in 2016?

First of all you want to find out what new technology will be available, because you can guarantee that will mean new ways of marketing your product and reaching customers. Virtual reality, for example, is set to take off in 2016 with sales of the devices soaring to 14 million. If you are prepared for things like this you can be the first to pounce on it and make it part of your marketing campaign.

Likewise, current platforms such as Twitter and Facebook launch new opportunities for marketing all the time. Again you need to jump on it and find out how you can effectively and uniquely incorporate it into your own campaign. Domino’s, for example, are taking full advantage of the popularity of emojis – by enabling customers to order a pizza simply by tweeting them the pizza emoji.

Finally, look ahead at events that are taking place in 2016 and consider how it could link up with your marketing. The Olympics take place in Brazil in 2016 which will get a huge amount of coverage across the world – what can you plan as part of your marketing campaign to take advantage of this?

Once you are prepared for everything you know will happen in 2016, keep an eye out throughout the year for anything that happens outside of this, so you can quickly jump on the back of it. In 2013, for example, during the Super Bowl, the power went out – Oreo were quick to send out a tweet of an Oreo in the dark that simply said ‘You can still dunk in the dark’ – which had a greater payoff for the company than ads that cost millions to create.

So, be prepared to create a diverse and effective marketing campaign in 2016 and this could be you!